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Tuesday, 11 February 2014

Slavoj Žižek Resurrects the Religion of Marxism

The basic thing about Slavoj
Žižek is that he's a good old-fashioned Marxist of the
purest kind. In fact he more or less says so himself. He has
certainly classed himself, many times, as, variously, a "radical
leftist”, a "communist in a qualified sense”, and, yes, a
“Marxist”. So this isn't
a case of some mad 'far-right conspiracist' accusing everyone who
dares to disagree with him of being a Marxist. Žižek
classes himself in this way.

Yet there's a big difference
between Žižek
and the old-school Marxist. Žižek is a Marxist who has drunk deep
from the wells of postmodernism, post-structuralism and structuralism
(as well as from other Continental fashions). He knows his Jean-Francois
Lyotard,
his Jacques Derrida and his Michel Foucault. (He first published
Derrida, for example, way back in 1967.)
Žižek knows his (non-Marxist) Continental philosophy very well. Why?
Primarily because all that knowledge will make it all the easier for him (or so
he thinks) to trounce or dispatch the rivals to traditional Marxism.
It has also enabled him to make revolutionary Marxism more
philosophically fashionable and up to date!

Sure, many hard-core Marxists
before Žižek have also got
to know their non-Marxist philosophical – though still 'radical' –
rivals or enemies. In fact some have committed the sacrilegious act
- against Marxism - of borrowing technical details, jargon and other stuff from such
sources. Louis Althusser, for example, raided the graves of
psychoanalysis (as has Žižek),
structuralism, etc.

Despite all that, I would say
that your average Trotskyist/progressive or communist in the UK
(though perhaps not to in France or Germany) is more or less
philosophically illiterate. Most of them (say, members/leaders of the
UK's Socialist Workers Party) will see the reading of any
non-Marxist philosopher – except to offer a 'critique' of his work
- as tantamount to apostasy. (The SWP's boss, Alexander Theodore
Callinicos, has written a book called Against
Postmodernism.)

Being a typical Marxist means
taking typically Marxist positions on most – or all – subjects.
This is what Žižek does to
a T. I'm not saying that Žižek
simply regurgitates Marx word-for-word or that he's even the
kind of Marxist you'd have found in, say, the 1950s, let alone in the
1920s. In fact even Lenin and Trotsky adapted Marx and, more
recently, the hard-core Stalinist Althusser
also did. (As I said, Žižek
has drunk deep from the wells of postmodernism,
post-structuralism, etc.) For example, one such sacrilegious
deviation from Marx, which many commentators have made much of, is
the fact that Žižek has
offered a 'critique' (yes, one of them again) of Marx's concept of
ideology.1

Žižek's
pure Marxism is also somewhat disguised by his prose style; not just
by his interest in non-Marxist philosophy. However, if you cut out
the jargon, the unbearable pretentiousness, the convoluted (i.e., the
endless clauses, few full stops, etc.) style, the
stream-of-consciousness improvisations, the copious footnotes and the
academese, etc., you will find the purist Marxist messages and
positions you could ever hope to find. In fact the bottom line is
that they seem, in the end, to be largely untouched by the
postmodernisms, post-structuralisms, etc. he argues against. As I
said, it may simply be that he has largely got to know all – or
much – of this non-Marxist stuff simply to offer a Marxist refutation or correction of it.

Indeed just as much
Continental philosophy disguises its banality and truisms in
pretentious prose, so Žižek hides
his commonplace Marxisms with an equally pompous prose. After all, he
has engaged with some of the most pretentious post-modernist and
post-structuralist writers on the planet. He could hardly come out
with the tabloid stuff (the “gutter journalism”) you find in, for
example, Socialist Worker - even if his views are very
similar, fundamentally, to what Trotskyists, etc. propagate.

So, again, all the jargon,
academese and pretentiousness (e.g., the references to Jacques
Lacan
and “the Real”)
seem to have the function of hiding the commonplace, banal and often
blatantly false or inaccurate Marxist positions and theories which
hide underneath.

Žižek, in other words,
keeps to Marxist fundamentals; just as all Marxists must do
otherwise they simply wouldn't be Marxists.

Žižekon Total Marxism & Total Capitalism

The following are two of
Žižek most basic Marxist
positions (which I express in almost Žižekian
prose):

i) Capitalism has an essence
and it is everywhere. It explains everything because it is the very
essence (yes, essence) of everything.
ii) Following from i), there
must therefore be a total (violent) revolution.

That's it really.

Take i) above. Žižek
allows György
Lukács
to put his
fundamentalist Marxist position when he says that the “young
Lukács”
believed that“the
class-and-commodity structure of capitalism is not just a phenomenon
limited to the particular 'domain' of economy, but the structuring
principle that over-determines the social totality, from politics to
art and religion.” (96)

It's clear that Žižek
- both here and
elsewhere - completely endorses that position. That quote fully
encapsulates the well-known Marxist notion of the relation between
“base” and “superstructure”. In fact this is the very thing
that sophisticated Marxists - from Eduard
Bernsteinonwards - began to
play down. Nonetheless, it's rejection – amongst the rejection of
other Marxist (religious) 'laws' and fundamentals - was also the very
thing which pious Marxists realised was sacrilegiously unMarxist and
even counterproductive in terms of praxis.

All this involves a dilemma
which Marxists must face.

The more sophisticated
Marxist positions become the less people understand them and the less
they fire-up the people to embrace Total Revolution. In other words,
you either have Marxist sophistication and no
revolution; or
Marxist simplicity/fundamentalism and at least a stronger possibility
of revolution. That's why there's often been a disconnection between
Marxist political parties/movements and Marxist
intellectuals. The Marxist political parties - being
political parties
- knew all along that the more sophisticated Marxism became the less
people would understand it and, as a consequence, the fewer people
would therefore be inspired by it. (Hence Marx's very own Communist
Manifesto.) Many
Marxists believe, at least silently, that it doesn't help the
revolution one bit to make Marxism too sophisticated. Keep Marxism
religious in nature and tone. Keep it simple, absolutist,
essentialist, messianic and millenarian otherwise there's simply no
point.

Žižek
himself (despite
his prose style) realised all this and that's
why he thoroughly endorses the Lukács
position above.

More specifically, Žižek
believes that capitalism “overdetermines” everything –
literally. It can be found everywhere – literally. In
contradiction of what Žižek
claims postmodernists, post-structuralists, etc.
believe, capitalism is not just about “the particular domain of
economy”. It's about everything. Its domain ranges from “politics
to art and religion”. It's also about – or “determines” - the
family, sexism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Islamic terrorism, science.... everything. (Read
The
Guardian’s
Seumas
Milne– he fully agrees with such Marxist totalism.) In
Žižek words, capitalism,
or the economy, “overdetermines the social totality”.

Žižek
also states his essentialist (as well as “universal”) case
by saying that capitalist

“production is
simultaneously the encompassing universal elements, the structuring
principle of the totality.”
(314)

Žižek
offers us more of his unbelievably totalist accounts of
capitalism.2

For example, Žižek
explains both his Marxist totalism and why that totalism leads
him to reject the post-mod emphasis on “subjectivities”. He
writes:

“... today's capitalism
is a kind of global machine that enables a multitude of ideologies,
from traditional religions to individualistic hedonism, to
'resignify' their logic so that they fit the frame... “ (328)

Again, Žižek's
logic of capitalist “logic” is brutally simple. According to him,
everything - from a “traditional religion” like Islam, to the
“individualistic hedonism” of post-mod philosophers or radical
pop stars, to green politics through to UKIP - occurs within the
domain of capitalism and is therefore automatically suspect from a
Marxist point of view. (Whether or not all this does indeed occur
within the “frame” of capitalism - and whether that statement
actually means anything - is, of course, another matter.)

Žižek
says more or less exactly the same thing just two notes later.
He says that capitalism

“has penetrated all
pores of social life, down to the most intimate spheres, introducing
unheard-off [sic] dynamics which no longer relies on patriarchal and
other fixed forms of domination, but generates fluid hybrid
identities.” (329)

Here again it actually
appears that Žižek is
somehow - and in some way - arguing against the existence of “hybrid
identities” as well as against the fact that capitalism has
introduced “unheard-of dynamics which no longer [rely] on
patriarchal and other fixed forms of generation”. In fact he is
arguing against these realities. Why? Simply because they all occur
within the capitalist “frame”. That's a good enough reason for
Žižek to be suspicious of
them - and even to be against them! (Again, whether all this does
occur within the capitalist “frame” - and whether that statement
actually means anything - is up for debate.)

Despite all this openly
acknowledged capitalist freedom, Žižek
still has hopes that things will change.

He follows the just-quoted
passage by saying that “the capitalist system is thus more
vulnerable than ever today” (329). “Marx's old formula still
holds: capitalism generates its own gravediggers.” With these
words, Žižek shows us how
pure and pious his Marxism is. He offers us that old chestnut:
capitalism “is thus more vulnerable than ever today”. Classic! I
just can't comprehend why Marxists seem to lack even the most basic
skills of self-analysis and self-criticism. Marxists - as everyone
knows (perhaps Marxists do too) - have been saying this every decade
for the last, roughly, 160 years. Every year Marxist groups talk
about the “capitalist crisis” and even about the “final
capitalist crisis”. The talk of capitalist crises can be recalled from the
1980s and it is replicated today; just as the warnings in the 1980s
replicated those of the 1970s and so on back to Marx's own day.

All this crisis-talk
is pretty mindless stuff when you think about it. Except, of course,
that every new “capitalist crisis” is indeed slightly different
to the last one. The content is slightly different; even though the
crisis part of the scenario remains the same. In Marx’s day,
the “pauperisation of the working class” etc. accounted for the
final capitalist crisis. In the 1980s, it was the large levels of
unemployment, etc. In the 1990s it was the “contradictions of
global capitalism”. In 2000, in Žižek's
case, post-mod “subjectivities” may well have taken capitalism
over the edge. The “subjectivities” which capitalism enables are
actually bringing about a “dissolution of all substantial social
links and also lets the genie out of the bottle” (329). These
“hybrid entities” (whatever they are) will “set free the
centrifugal potentials that the capitalist system will no longer be
able fully to contain”.

In other words, Žižek,
as a typical Marxist, is grasping at straws. And he does so because
he has a deep faith in the collapse of capitalism; just as he has a
deep faith in Marxism itself. He is a believer. No matter what the
situation will be in, say, 2020 or 2050 (just as was the case for
Marxists in the 1980s and 1880s), he will remain a believer. Even if
capitalism has achieved social peace, full employment and nirvana; it
would still be social peace, full employment and nirvana within the
“frame” of capitalism. Besides which, as a Marxist, he would
inevitably find problems with capitalist social piece,
capitalist full employment and capitalist nirvana; just
as when, in the 1950s and early 1960s, capitalism (in the West)
created full employment and social peace (at least to some extent),
Marxists still had massive problems with it. Marxists will always
have a problem with capitalism. If they didn't have a problem with
capitalism - no matter what shape capitalism actually takes - they
wouldn't be Marxists.

Žižek on the Private and
the Political

What has also got the
Marxist's goat is the (capitalist?) distinction between the private
and the political. This ties in with the views that capitalism
“permeates”, to use Žižek's
word, every aspect of society. It is still well-known that in the
1960s feminists, and many others, tried to blur the distinction
between the private/personal and the political and indeed they came
up with the slogan: “The personal
is the political.” Of course Marxists are primary concerned
with making the economy political and, in tandem with that,
convincing us that capitalism permeates the private or the personal.

Žižek
explains the “Political/non-Political” (his way of putting it)
division in the following way. He talks of “the positing of some
domains (economy, private intimacy, art...) as 'apolitical'” (95).
However, in a classic Marxist manner, he also asks us:

“[W]hat if the political
gesture par excellence, as its purest, is precisely the gesture of
separating the Political from the non-Political, of excluding some
domains from the Political?” (95)

Of course this rejection of
the political/non-political division ties in with the
“subjectivities” - the “hybrid identities” - which post-mods
celebrate and champion and which Žižek
takes them to believe are “non-Political”. (Whether they do or
not depends on which “subjectivities” and which post-mods we are
talking about.)

And just as Žižek
rejects the political/non-political division when supposedly upheld
by post-mods, he is, of course, equally against it when upheld by the
capitalist Right: who, according to the Marxist tradition, more or less
invented the division. Thus Žižek
now questions the split between “state and civil society”. (His
totalitarian intent deepens yet more.) He claims that “[e]ven the
very opposition between the state and civil society is thoroughly
ambivalent today” (314).

1Žižek, so some Marxists
say (though it's not entirely true), rejects the Marxist notion of
ideology as 'false consciousness' (except, of course, when that
ideology is Marxism). Apparently Zizek explains things in terms of
people's unconscious motives instead. Presumably that's because the
unconscious is the unconscious, it makes no sense to call it 'false';
though I may be wrong.

2 Žižek would happily admit to being a totalist quite simply
because the “totality” - his own word - that is capitalism
demands its own totalist response.

The Labour Party, on the whole, isn't a Marxist or a communist party. However, there are very many cross-currents and interactions between the Labour Party and the Trotskyist/communist Left, mainly on the periphery but also deeper within.

As for the Fabian Society, it isn't a “revolutionary" (as in violent revolution) organisation but it is still, nonetheless, uniquely dangerous and elitist. Its approach to "radically changing society" is very similar to that taken by the followers of the Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci.